Wanted: cultural drivers for an internet generation

IF YOU want to know who really dreams up and propels Australian culture, don't look to the airbrushed faces that gaze blankly from magazine covers. Ignore the singers whose chart-toppers echo through shopping malls, and the home-grown Hollywood stars that grace your local multiplex. Instead, look to the fringe dwellers, the rebels, reactionaries and ruffians people who rather than surfing the pop culture wave set about questioning, subverting and reimagining it.

Monash University academic, author and filmmaker Tony Moore has devoted the better part of his career to researching Australia's iconoclasts, people he calls our cultural entrepreneurs. For him, they not only influence our sense of national identity, they also nurture future generations of creative thinkers. Progressive attitudes and policies in the arts, he believes, encourage inspired thinking in broader disciplines: politics, education and so on.

Moore is fascinated by the ebb and flow of culture. He likes to join dots; in the movers and shakers of Melbourne in the 1870s, he sees the same aspirations and frustrations as he sees in the engine rooms of Australian culture today. He likes to map the creative paths of individuals to their contexts and coteries and find patterns and cycles, then poses questions about the role governments, institutions and private benefactors play in supporting the health and vitality of Australian culture today.

Why study such a topic? Because history repeats, a lesson Moore first learnt as a history student at Sydney University in the late 1970s. And because Australia suffers from a peculiar brand of cultural amnesia; each wave of cultural punks and visionaries know little of their antecedents, which means they rarely benefit from tales of the fruits, failures or wisdom they left behind.

Moore's most cherished cultural entrepreneur is a little known and somewhat unlikely candidate: Marcus Clarke. Born into a wealthy English family, Clarke came to Australia by boat in 1862, aged 16, and went on to become "the father of modern Australian journalism, [and] an antipodean Oscar Wilde". Between social calls, he wrote The Term of His Natural Life, penned satirical newspaper columns, established a series of underground nightclubs, and "invented a new Australian character to challenge the bushman the urban bohemian writer". Moore will make a documentary about him in 2012. Without Clarke, he says, the likes of Henry Lawson, Dulcie Deamer, Germaine Greer, Nick Cave and Michael Gudinski, each of whom have played an important role in alternately satirising, lampooning, and marketing Australian culture since, wouldn't exist.

People like Clarke, Moore argues, provide an invaluable window on to our current cultural predicaments. So what can we learn from a 19th-century playboy? According to Moore, Clarke was instrumental in bringing together a lively coterie of Melbourne writers, poets, artists and performers, in turn exposing their talents to a broader social demographic. He was finding them an audience, in essence much in the same way that entrepreneurs today pluck artists from the cultural fringes and deliver them to the highly marketable cultural mainstream.

The saleability of reactionaries and their exploits (as summarised in The Rebel Sell, by Canadians Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter) is an industry each of Australia's cultural entrepreneurs has wholly embraced. Yet just what constitutes marketable rebellion in the contemporary cultural sphere the chk-chk-boom girl, the antics of Corey Worthington, the playfully clever subversion of Chris Lilley remains unpredictable.

One of Moore's pet entrepreneurs is Keith Murdoch (father of Rupert), who used his network of well-placed supporters to host an exhibition of modern art and confront the highly conservative Melbourne art establishment in the 1930s. Banned from the state galleries, who dismissed modernist painters as "perverts and degenerates", Murdoch held the exhibition in Sydney on a floor of David Jones, where it drew large crowds.

Moore also champions Barry Humphries and Tim Burstall, who directed Alvin Purple, as well as Phillip Adams, who played a pivotal role in resurrecting the Australian film industry in the 1970s. In each of these cultural entrepreneurs, Moore sees models and methods for negotiating our current cultural transition into the multimedia age.

Just as Adams lured avant-garde filmmakers into the cultural mainstream 40 years ago, so too must emerging entrepreneurs guide today's fringe dwellers into the contemporary cultural "delta" ("mainstream" is a redundant term for Moore). In the same way Bill Collins introduced a generation of film lovers to classic films on his TV shows, Moore says we need new appointees to curate the emerging wave of material being uploaded to YouTube, Twitter, MySpace and other social networking forums from suburban bedrooms and studios. The commercial networks, with their penchant for nostalgia and obsession with ageing stars (Bert Newton and Daryl Somers), need incentives to find them.

While the role wealthy private benefactors play in supporting artists to thrive is not lost on Moore he cites John Reed's support of Angry Penguins; Stephen Murray-Smith and Overland; Morry Schwartz and The Monthly as examples he remains a firm advocate for progressive government policy. Double Jay (now JJJ), which was established in 1974 as a Whitlam Labor government initiative, is, he believes, a prime illustration of the way policy can create spaces for alternative cultures to flourish. As it was, 2JJ was embroiled in controversy from its first day of broadcasting; the first song the station played on air was You Just Like Me Cos I'm Good In Bed by Skyhooks. Again, it's the rebel sell.

Also in need of overhaul is the current "welfare model" of arts funding, where artists routinely spend vast amounts of time writing exhaustive applications for grants. Bureaucracy spells the death of creativity, says Moore, and ignores our colourful history of DIY practitioners who mounted extraordinary exhibitions without public funding.

As for where Australian culture will head next, Moore is busily mapping that too. "The new creative bohemian crucibles in Melbourne are places like Box Hill, Frankston and Footscray where students on struggle street meet new technology, ethnic alchemy, and hopefully money to get their projects up and happening."

Tony Moore's Bohemian Nation: A history of Australian counter-cultures and avant-gardes from Clarke to Cave will be published by Pier 9 in 2012.